As a main contributor to the watchdog, I initially signed up for the service back when it was just student networks because then, the privacy settings and policy were very fair and only for a small number of college students. Since that time I’ve watched a small thoughtful company grow into this merciless, uncaring, advertisement vehicle from hell.

As a professional company, if you’re so hell-bent on having such a large user base then you ought to be able to provide for that user base adequately. They have not. Facebook touts how many million users it has, but the bragging stops there. What about their hundred-million users? And what about their lucrative marketing and national security deals?

So they have a user base but instead of working with the users, like they began their business on, Facbook keeps removing the availability of controls over the user’s own personal information and – the interface seems to be working against us, the user, more often than with us. And we know we can’t trust Facebook Corp. because they’ve been caught making detrimental changes to their privacy policy without the intention of telling any of it’s users about it. They aren’t handling the user base as carefully and respectfully as they did once and that’s a red flag.

What’s the cause for the change? Is it because the corporation has become too large to manage?
It shouldn’t be, they asked for it so they should be ready for it. Ultimately, we at the Facebook Watchdog feel the reasoning behind the negative changes are more devious.

Facebook user’s information and relationships are valuable, Facebook user’s pockets are valuable, the hearts and minds of the platform’s users are not.

So if you have an account why not just delete it?

As a main contributor:
1. I work in the creative sector. I need the “live Rolodex.”
2. My personal information is being held hostage. And whether you have an account on Facebook or not, you can bet your information is hostage too. I’m not really happy to just walk away from that fact.
3. Also the company is attacking and redefining what the definition of “personal privacy” means to every private citizen and in every country that’s open to it. See “How online life distorts privacy rights for all ~” up above.
4. I have taken to “deleting” (aka hiding/removing) just about 90% of the information I’ve stored on my account and am putting it up on my own rss, hosted by myself. Facebook Corp. however has made this ridiculously impossible to do. They clearly don’t want you “deleting” anything since they’ve made searching out all your information impossible in some cases, and just very difficult in others.

After watching Facebook’s transformation into Mr. Hyde for the last half decade, we at the watchdog have started this blog to publish all issues we, and other people have with managing our personal information via Facebook. We started this experiment as to be useful evidence for the FTC and any other investigative bodies which are looking into Facebook’s practices, and to show the public what Facebook is up to as well.

We want to stick with this fight and see it through to the end.

— We dedicate the decision to publicize all of Facebook issues we can dig up to it’s very owner, Mark Zuckerberg who said at the top of 2010 that privacy is a thing of the past. If that’s the case Mark, lets make all of Facebook’s back end troubles and corporate secrets public too. —